This disclosure relates generally to the field of screen sharing during online communication.
Screen sharing may be used to communicate information from a user's (or sender) graphical user interface (GUI) screen in, for example, an online chat or web conference. The screen share may comprise an image of the user's GUI screen that is sent to a receiver. The GUI screen may comprise metadata, including but not limited to confidentiality information, audit trail information, text, table cell color, a uniform resource locator (URL) link, a search query, or a persistent session ID. The metadata is not captured in the screen share image; for example, metadata such as selectable text or clickable URL links may be lost. The metadata must be captured and shared separately.
Different types of metadata require different capturing methods. For example, text may be highlighted and copied, table cell color may be extracted from HTML code, a search query may be copied from a search textbox, a URL link may be right clicked, and “Copy Link Location” selected, a screen capture of a bitmap may be extracted by pushing the printscreen key, or a session ID may be invisible, with no available extraction method. A sender of a screen share may not be able to extract more than one of type of metadata at a time. The receiver may determine some metadata via post processing and analysis of received screen share image, using, for example, optical character recognition (OCR) or lexicographic analysis. However, such analysis does not capture all types of metadata that are present in the sender's GUI screen at the time of the screen share, and may perform inefficiently or inaccurately. Therefore, in an instant messaging scenario, the sender may need to copy and paste the metadata information separately and manually to the receiving party, which limits the usefulness of the screen share. In a web conference scenario, the meeting host may not be able to copy and paste metadata without interrupting the realtime nature of the web conference.